Blog Post One: Response to one of the poems from the reading.

America

Allen Ginsberg

( 1:20 AM - Hi. I don’t actually have a copy of the reading, so I’m literally making this placeholder post to say, yes, I am aware that I’m supposed to be writing something. I’ll edit it in as soon as I’m done with the reading and no I really didn’t forget I swear it’ll be up before class. )

2:20 AM edit - This poem really stood out to me. Wikipedia has been down all day, so I couldn’t help myself to the luxury of looking up half of the historical references the easy way. But the way it was written felt very light in a creepy way. That may have a lot to do with the fact that the poet is addressing America as if it were a person and not a country.

He asks America a ton of questions as if he was blaming it for his problems. It’s almost a stream of consciousness in which he has an idea, runs with it, finds a problem with himself, and blames America the country but in a way he would blame a person. It’s almost if he’s trying to get the reader to think he’s a little disorganized. Again, I don’t have Wikipedia, but I’m pretty sure that some of the things he admits to being or doing are taboo. Depending on when this poem was written.

Also, I’m using this website to read the poem and on the very bottom, it says that the poet has a psychiatrist. So maybe what I read as “disorganized” is what people read as “psychiatrist patient”. So that would explain line three.

But then there are the two stanzas where the poet suddenly says “I am America. / I am talking to myself again.”

I’m starting to think that yes, he is crazy, and so is America. A war is mentioned, so I think that this could be taken two different ways. This poem could be about the poet’s own feelings of chaos with the things going on in America…or it could be a reflection of a crazed and chaotic time period that leads up to war (I get that impression from the last few lines. The tone suddenly becomes serious and we have a coherent and lasting thought. The speaker seems to go from grabbing at multiple incidents and ideas to actually digesting what’s going on and deciding to do something about it, which could be a description of history and the progression towards war as events go from focused on anything and everything to that one thought; the war.)